Tableau Data Catalog: Diving into workbooks’ complexity

The icing on the cake

A workbook is a nesting doll

Allegory of a workbook hosting a dashboard hosting a sheet (Photo by Sudowoodo on Shutterstock)
  • A worksheet contains a single view. It’s the worksheet that’s related to a Published Data Source, depending on the fields used in it. Warning: this object is referred to as « Sheet » in the Metadata API,
  • A Dashboard compiles zero, one, or several worksheets.
  • A Story dynamically displays worksheets and/or Dashboards. At iAdvize, we never use this functionality, so we don’t include the Story object in our Data Catalog.

The diagram

Playing with Tableau Metadata API

The queries used to gather metadata about the three objects (Workbook, Dashboard and worksheet) are quite simple:

Our hack

The main difficulty here was to link a Field to a worksheet using it. We managed to get the relationship with this query, using the sheetFieldInstances field from the Sheets object:

Let the show begin!

With this last piece of the Data Catalog project, we can now provide answer to the following use cases:

  • a member of the Data team would like to check the Published Data Sources usage by counting how many Workbooks connect to them
  • a member of the Data team would like to know how many Workbooks contain a view called « User Guide » that helps the user with this content
  • a Tableau user would like to find a Dashboard using the Field « Client Name ».

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Publications from the iAdvize engineering team :)

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